


Nightmare

by illusive_delusions



Category: The Martian (2015), The Martian - All Media Types, The Martian - Andy Weir
Genre: Coping, Established Relationship, F/M, Mental Health Issues, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, True Love, but it can make the day a bit easier to face, true love doesn't always save the day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-19
Updated: 2017-03-19
Packaged: 2018-10-07 14:01:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10362048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illusive_delusions/pseuds/illusive_delusions
Summary: When his recurring nightmares wake Mark Watney up at an ungodly hour, his thoughts turn to the best things about his post-Mars life.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this is something that I found on my old computer at my parent's house when I went home to visit this week. It's a few months old at best and I barely skimmed it so I could write an effective summary - I didn't even edit anything... so yeah... it might suck... it *probably* sucks... but while I'm posting stuff I may as well post all of it, yeah? This is clearly a very high quality operation I'm running here innit? Anyways lemme know what y'all think (even if what you think is that it's horse shit lol) xxxx

_ He was completely and utterly fucked. There was just no way around it - no matter how much of an optimistic swing he tried to put on his situation in his emails home and in his correspondence with Dr. Kapoor back in Houston, he was surely going to die. There were just so many goddamn things that could go wrong. Starting with the fact that ever since the Great Airlock Explosion of Sol 119 - when he’d been forced to MacGyver the HAB back together with nothing but duct tape and military-grade Saran wrap - the constant, howling Martian winds had been doing their absolute damndest to worm their way in between the HAB canvas and the adhesive like a predator which had gotten a taste of its prey’s blood and was now ravenous for more.  _

 

_ In fact, if he sat up now from his cramped bunk and took just a few short steps, he would be in full sight of the HAB’s previously gaping wound with it’s makeshift bandage whipping violently in the breeze. Whipping violently away from the HAB. Tearing and pulling and straining against the feeble bonds of the duct tape until it inevitably pulled free of the worn canvas and took everything in the HAB with it - including himself - out into the harsh, unforgiving Martian night where he would feel his lungs freezing solid and his blood stopping dead in his veins and he would be overwhelmed by an icy pang of dread as everything was ripped from him one final time. He would have just long enough to suffer the loneliest death in the history of mankind before Mars finally claimed him as its victim for good and he’d succumb to the cold and spiraling blackness forever and -- _

 

\-- and Mark was jerked suddenly from his familiar nightmare shooting bolt upright in bed, drenched in a cold sweat that reminded him just a little too much of the icy grip of Martian winds for his liking. He sat like that, in the half-light thrown about the room by the street lamps outside for a long time, staring out the open curtains of the window nearest the bed which he left open for this express purpose. After an indeterminate period during which he allowed the passing traffic sounds and the city lights outside to ground him, Mark rolled over to the bedside table and clicked the button which illuminated his phone’s lock screen to reveal the time. 4:17 AM on Sunday morning. Great. 

 

He  _ should _ be dozing soundly thanks to the seemingly endless supply of medications his shrinks had supplied him to help with his anxiety and PTSD and insomnia and everything else. He  _ should  _ have been able to sleep in until ten or eleven or even later on this glorious day off,  _ should  _ have been awakened not by a heart wrenching nightmare,  but by the gentle proddings of his eager girlfriend - who he had been very pleased to discover had a bit of a thing for lazy Sunday mornings spent on quite a different kind of heart wrenching bedroom activity. They  _ should _ have dragged themselves out of bed at noon or later in search of breakfast and a show to watch or a movie to rent or a pleasant lazy weekend activity to plan. Instead, he was wide awake at an ungodly hour embroiled in a grotesquely familiar restlessness that would not allow him to go back to sleep for all the melatonin capsules in the world.

 

4:22 AM. Great.

 

Well if he was awake he might as well be up, and he could start by doing something about the awful sheen of sweat which was still causing his shirt to stick uncomfortably to his chest. He shifted gently, attempting to extricate himself from the tangle of sheets quietly so as not to disturb the still-sleeping form of Mindy Park. Not that she would have minded him waking her up to talk about his nightmare, in fact she would probably be upset to wake up later this morning and learn that he had insisted on handling this anxiety attack on his own - something which his therapist had told him time and time again was a _very_ _bad idea_ \- but he just didn’t have the heart to wake her. A part of Mark seriously longed for her company - her easy, loving smile and the way she always seemed to know just what to say to bring him back to the here and now, but one glance down at her gentle face bathed in the glow of the city lights convinced him to let her rest on. She’d lost enough sleep over him to last a lifetime anyways, and she would surely live to lose more.

 

Once free from the mound of sheets that had enveloped him, Mark cast one last lingering gaze on Mindy’s lovely, peaceful features and sadly bid farewell to their lazy Sunday morning. Placing a ghost of a kiss on the crown of his girlfriend’s head, he turned and made his way to the bathroom, stripping from his sweat-drenched clothes as he went. Despite the hot Houston summer air which hung like a cloud over the apartment even in spite of the A/C running full blast, Mark cranked up the shower’s heat, luxuriating in the feel of the hot water beating a rhythm into his aching back and shoulders. Another lingering effect of his time as Mars’s sole resident was the permanent strain he had caused to his muscles and vertebrae. Luckily, these symptoms were more easily managed by his meds than his mental distress was. 

 

Due to his naturally optimistic disposition it was usually pretty easy for him to persevere through the fog of anxiety and panic which sometimes settled over his mind. Even on the days when it wasn’t so easy, his therapist’s constant yammering that his thoughts and feelings were “normal” ensured that he could normally cope. When he needed to get out of his own head he could always rely on Mindy, or drop a line to his parents in Chicago, or call up Martinez or any member of the crew and he would instantly feel the fog lifting a bit and his mind becoming a little clearer. But sometimes, in the middle of the night when the world was quieter and the people he loved were all asleep, Mark wished he didn’t have to rely quite so heavily on their support. He knew it wasn’t a sign of weakness to ask for help - that his friends and family were more than happy to lend their time to his lingering struggles; but how he wished some days that he could spend more of his time giving  _ back  _ to these people rather than taking more from them. 

 

Mark wasn’t naive, he knew that there was nothing he could ever do to truly repay the debt he owed to these people - or to anybody else on earth for that matter, but it still pissed him off that he had spent so much of his time since returning home getting even further into the red with the people closest to him. Was it really too much to ask for that he consistently be in a fit enough mental state to not burden his loved ones with more worry? Apparently so. 

 

With a frustrated sigh Mark shut off the shower and dried off, wrapping his towel around his waist as he busied himself with the mundane tasks of shaving and brushing his teeth in a vain attempt to distract himself from the bleak shadow of his thoughts. That was one of his shrink’s tips for his occasional but disruptive depressive moods -  _ routine, routine, routine _ . As much as he hated to admit it, it did help a little to anchor himself to the world with the everyday minutia of his basic care and hygiene. 

 

Mark let himself relax a bit into the mindless activities, only really returning to alertness as he flicked off the bathroom light and crept as silently as possible back into the bedroom to get dressed. Padding quietly around the room he collected his discarded clothing and placed them in the hamper before turning to retrieve his phone from the bedside table. He started slightly as Mindy turned in her sleep, shifting towards his side of the bed as if to seek him out. In the pale blue light which was advancing its way through the room Mark could more clearly make out her features - her tangle of bedhead, the faint smile on her lips, the little spot of drool on her pillow.

 

As he tiptoed out of their bedroom and towards the kitchen to fix himself a cup of coffee, he was glad again not to have disturbed her. She really did get almost as little sleep as he did between his frequent nightmares and the fact that her own sleep cycle had been permanently damaged during her time as his “stalker” - as she called it. Out of everyone at NASA who had dedicated themselves to bringing him home, Mark still had the hardest time comprehending Mindy’s personal sacrifice. It was impossible to wrap his brain around what she had done for him back then when he’d been a total stranger to her. She had put her entire life on hold for  _ years _ for his sake, adjusting her schedule to his, learning Morse code to decipher his messages, and dedicating the whole of her waking hours to figuring out and reporting on all the dumb-fuck things he’d done in his attempts to get back home. The sheer scope of it was almost unfathomable. 

 

And that wasn’t even factoring in all that she had done for him since his return. She had given him so much, offering him patience and empathy even when he really didn’t deserve it, being his friend, giving him somebody he could really talk to about things. She was always there for him when things were bad, and when things were good there was still nobody else he’d rather be around. Her dry humor, her passion for her work, her delightful  _ nerdiness  _ had all enthralled him when he’d first met her, and while she had been incredibly shy back then (and was still reticent to take credit for her role in his rescue) they had formed a connection which had its roots in his gratitude towards her but was ultimately about so much more. 

 

She made him feel less like Mark Watney the Martian Hero and more like Mark Watney the dorky botanist with an affinity for the Chicago Cubs and deep dish pizza and sustainable agriculture practices.  Regardless of how the godawful tabloids portrayed their relationship - as him fucking her out of thankfulness or as her latching on to fame or whatever bullshit they had spun up most recently - the honest to god truth was that Mindy Park was his  _ person _ independent of his (admittedly undying) gratitude to her or anything else. And god did he love her. Their romantic relationship was still less than a year old, and while they had been friends for several months before Mark still reeled sometimes at just how quickly his life had become inexorably linked with hers. He supposes if he was a more poetic type of guy he would say that his whole ordeal was worth it because it brought them together, but he prefers to think that they would have met without any Martian interference. He knows he didn’t need to almost die a million and a half times to love Mindy the way that he does and it infuriates him when people just assume that his feelings for her are only due to what she did for him. 

 

His feelings for her were  _ not  _ one of the many side effects of his trauma, they were the reason he fought so hard to get off that godforsaken rock in the first place. Not his feelings for Mindy specifically obviously, but his relationship with her was one of the many things he had experienced since he’d been home that truly reminded him just what he’d been fighting so goddamn hard to get back to. Eating pizza until he feels like he’s gonna explode, watching the Cubs with his dad, the crinkle-eyed smile his mom gives him when he’s made her especially proud, shit talking Martinez over beers and more pizza, and the clenching feeling he gets in his chest when Mindy Park tells him she loves him. Those are the things that made his whole ordeal feel like it  _ meant something _ .  

 

He supposes all those things make his continuing problems worth it too… 

 

His stupid fucking shrink is really getting to him… 

 

And he’s been sitting in front of the coffee pot so long lost in thought that his cup is ice cold. He glances at the clock on the microwave. 7:03AM. Better. 

  
On a whim, Mark decided to make something proper for breakfast. Just because his Sunday morning couldn’t be what he’d planned didn’t mean it all had to go to shit, right? Mindy could wake up to the smell of crackling bacon and frying eggs and literally anything but hash browns and he could tell her about his anxiety attack, and then hug her and tell her that he loves her and just keep putting one foot in front of the other with her and hope that next Sunday he’d get to sleep in. It sounds to Mark like the best plan he’s had in awhile.

**Author's Note:**

> whoomp there it is


End file.
